The carpet outside wasn’t quite red, but there were plenty of sequins, plunging necklines, and faux-casual acceptance speeches last night when about a hundred publishing types gathered at a club in the Meatpacking District for the 2010 Moby Awards for book trailers.
Book trailers have emerged in recent years as an important part of book marketing, though how much the often ingenious (and expensive) videos help to sell books is anybody’s guess.
The roster of nominees included some impressive literary and extraliterary firepower, though many of the nominees — including Thomas Pynchon, up for Best Performance by an Author for his voiceover in the trailer for “Inherent Vice” — didn’t show.
Zach Galifianakis, who was not in the crowd, won the award for Best Cameo for his searing portrayal of John Wray in the trailer for Wray’s novel “Lowboy.” (Wray — who was also, suspiciously, the presenter for the award — played Galifianakis.)
Dennis Cass won Best Performance by an Author for the hilarious and much-forwarded “Book Launch 2.0,” which on closer inspection turns out to have been meant to promote his memoir “Head Case.” (Current number of views on YouTube: 66,066. Current Amazon ranking: #730,822.)
The award for Best Low Budget/Indie Book Trailer went to Kathryn Regina’s delightful “I Am in the Air Right Now,” while the mind-blowing stop-motion animation of Maurice Gee’s “Going West,” produced by the New Zealand Book Council, took home the prize for Best Big Budget/Big House trailer.
There were also special awards for Most Annoying Use of Klezmer Music, Biggest Waste of Conglomerate Money, Bloodiest, Bloodiest, Bloodiest Trailer (the low-budget underdog “Killer”) and Most Annoying Appearance by an Author. (That means you, Jonathan Safran Foer!)
The novelist and critic Dale Peck, who knows a thing or two about annihilating a book’s prospects, presented the award for Book Trailer Least Likely to Sell a Book to Patricia Rockwell’s “Sounds of Murder.” Mercifully, a technical glitch prevented him from playing it for the blood-thirsty crowd.
Dennis Johnson of Melville House and the MobyLives blog, which organized the event, also gave a special Golden Whale statuette — a gray whale, since the sperm whale cousins of Moby-Dick were all sold out at Toys “R” Us — for best foreign book trailer to the creators of “Etcetera and Otherwise,” a violently comic assault on Canadian literary lions done in a style that brings Margaret Atwood into a kind of north-of-the-border “South Park.” (Blame Canada indeed!)
That trailer also includes a line that itself deserves an award for Best Blurb: “This book decapitated Michael Ondaatje!”
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